Firefox vs. Internet Explorer

Welcome to my first posting on Comscore Voices. Here, I’ll take the opportunity to discuss topics and provide information that I hope will be relevant – and valuable – to anyone who is keenly interested in the continued development of the Internet as a powerful platform for consumers and marketers alike. I’ll also share some of the more important lessons I’ve learned over the course of my career, which includes more than a decade as the CEO of a large public market research company. I’ll leave it to my fellow bloggers from the senior ranks of Comscore to outline the objectives they have set for their own postings.

As I was thinking about my first post, a Comscore study came to mind that I thought would be of particular interest to the blogosphere. In this study, we examined the differences between those people who use Mozilla’s Firefox as their primary browser versus those who use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Firefox, the upstart in the browser wars, has carved out a meaningful market share against IE.

Our study proves what many might have suspected: Firefox users are demographically different in several important ways. For example, Firefox users are slightly more likely to be male (55 percent) than Internet Explorer users (50 percent).

In addition, compared to IE users, Firefox users more likely to have annual household incomes of at least $75,000.

Firefox users are significantly younger: They are 69 percent more likely than IE users to be between the ages of 18-24.

In summary, Firefox users are younger than the average Internet user, are 26 percent more likely to have incomes above $75,000, and also have a higher likelihood of being male. Interestingly, they are 13 percent more likely to have broadband connections. This leads us to the second part of this topic, which I will post soon, which will address how Firefox users are early-adopters of Web 2.0 technologies. I will also describe Firefox users based on their ‘cognographic’ profile, which is Comscore’s proprietary measure of users’ interests, passions and lifestyles.